Eqo sounds like it ought to be popularizing yodelling on the web, but in fact the Vancouver, Canada-based firm allows users to take their social networks with them when they walk away from the computer. I spoke to Bill Tam, Eqo’s CEO, this week about his startup and their technology.

Eqo have created a worldwide VoIP network to create a framework for low-cost calling, and also to allow Instant Messaging (IM) clients to stay logged-on from the mobile handset. Eqo engineers have built a small application that loads onto a variety of handsets, and can log the user onto AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk , ICQ and Jabber. IM has been readily embraced by younger net users, many of whom use it in preference to email and to voice. However, Tam doesn’t think the appeal of Eqo is only to the young:

In fact our customers fall neatly into the age-group 19 to 35, but we do have a number of demographics within that, including the migrant markets who really value free or low-cost international calling. There are business users in the mix too, especially since we rolled out platform support for Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

The Eqo client shows a unified list of your contacts (from MSN, GTalk etc) along with their presence status, so it’s possible to see at a glance who is available, and press a button to chat with them. Like the desktop equivalents, it’s possible to have several conversations at the same time, although of course with a standard mobile phone keypad speed of typing is limited.

While social networking on the move is key element of Eqo, Tam sees low-cost calling as a key part of the strategy to build the user-base and grow the business. But is it free calling or low-cost calling? Tam:

Eqo users have the proposition that if they invite other people to become Eqo users, then those calls are free, but we also recognise that there’s an awful lot of calls that happen on landlines and mobile phones that perhaps we don’t support, and for that we do charge a nominal amount.

Unlike some of the other companies in the mobile VoIP business, Eqo do not take VoIP to the handset, but have local termination using standard GSM, then the VoIP backbone network delivers the lower-cost long-distance routing. Using GSM to the handset is part of what differentiates them from others in the mobile VoIP business today, Tam:

We all have slightly different approaches to the market: Truphone and Fring have concentrated on higher-end handsets that can take advantage of broadband wireless, whether it’s WiFi or 3G, our concentration’s really been to make this accessibility available on everyday handsets, so what we do is to oncentrate making it work on feature phones, on lower-end handsets and makign the experience so that you don’t need o be a technologist to use it, we want to make it consumable by everyday people.

The Eqo application started on Java handsets, but now embraces Windows Mobile and Symbian S60, which Tam says means support for over 400 different handset models today.In the Eqo offering, Eqo users can call to other Eqo users free-of-charge (and message free of charge), where Eqo to mobile or landline a charged at a per minute rate. Users purchase ‘Eqo credits’ that can be spent on call charges (of the order of 2 cents per minute regardless of distance) or messaging. However, in the future Tam believes that this is the basis of their own micro-payment system:

What we wanted to do was establish a credit system that would allow users to not only to transact communications, but ultimately to purchase content or other mobile elements that can be monetized.

Joining Eqo is free-of-charge, and in fact a small amount of credit is on the account at sign-up so that you can use all of the features immediately. The Eqo client can be downloaded from www.eqo.com, or via the mobile web direct to the handset at m.eqo.com.

A couple of weeks ago aussie VoIP outfit Voxalot launched a free-calling utility and “Call Me” button inside Facebook. They have now added more features to the VoxCall utility, so it’s possible to link to GOOG-411 and TellMe, also with a free call. VoxCall continues to offer free conference rooms via the same app, now also with private as well as public conference rooms. Voxalot’s Technical Director Martin Burns promises that there are yet more enhancements in the pipeline.

Also launching a Facebook app this week are VoIP mobile operator Truphone. Truphone are also offering a “Call Me Free” button for your Facebook profile, and the app comes with a whole host of options. Like VoxCall, the Truphone app can be pointed your SIP URI (like martyndavies@sip.blognation.com), but you can also point to a regular telephone number: a US/Canadian mobile or landline, a UK landline, or if you are already a customer of theirs, you can use your Truphone mobile number. You can also route calls to your GoogleTalk client, or if you have one to a GrandCentral number.

I installed the Truphone Call Me button on my Facebook profile, and pretty quickly received a call from a friend via the button. He was using a MacBook, and I was using my Nokia phone, routed via my Truphone number. The call quality was good, and the call was free for both of us. The caller ID came up as ‘truphone’, which was a bit confusing; perhaps it should have said ‘Facebook Button’?

As well as working on the profile page, the Call Me button can be dropped on other apps, for example as an embedded link when you send a Facebook message. As Dean Elwood, Platform Director at Truphone says:

“One particularly exciting thing is that anytime a new service that accepts attachments is introduced to Facebook, our application will work on it because the Truphone Call Me button can be dropped into any attachment. So people may use our application in ways that haven’t been envisaged yet.”

Google Maps for Mobile is another one of Google’s remarkable and free little apps, which in my case provided a bit of fun on my Nokia phone over the weekend. I’ve been running the app for a few weeks now, downloaded from www.google.com/gmm/, but there’s now a new beta version available with a feature called My Location.

This new toy allows you to find your location using cell positioning information (i.e. mapping Cell Id to rough location), so actually you don’t need a GPS in order to put a pin in the map. Looking at the screen shot, you can see the blue dot that represents my location the other day. This is not bad actually, since I was standing outside a shop on the opposite side of the road, so I imagine this is within about 20m of my actual location, a useful fix accuracy. About 10 minutes later I tried again, and the dot had moved about 50m to the left, becoming less accurate. The lack of accuracy I guess can be forgiven, since Surrey towns have many fewer cell towers than, say, the centre of London. I look forward to trying it out in London later today.

At home today, the blue dot is surrounded by a fainter blue circle, indicating an error zone of 1700m. My actual location is still about 150m further outside the circle, but again probably due to the poverty of cell towers. This same faint blue circle is also used when you use Google Maps Mobile in GPS mode, of course in this case showing a much tighter error circle, perhaps 2 to 5m. By the way, if you want to know the location, power and ownership of cell towers in your location, there’s a lookup service provided online by Ofcom.

Update: the blue dot did move to a location about 400m away momentarily, but now it’s disappeared back up to the North again.

New location feature aside, Google Maps Mobile is a nice simple utility to carry around with you on your phone. There are some niggling defects with the new version as with the previous one. Firstly, I normally use this with an external Bluetooth GPS, the GlobalSat BT-338, which is a nice, pocket-sized GPS with integrated rechargeable battery. Google Maps recognizes this device, and can get a good fix from it, but it does seem to nag a lot about the ‘weak’ satellite data, which is odd because this is by far the most sensitive GPS unit I’ve ever owned, and generally seems to work well with most apps. My second niggle is that Google Maps doesn’t really cache enough (or any?) mapping information. I have room on my memory card to store a lot of data, but Google Maps seems to like to read everything live off the network, which of course on the move means paying for 3G or GPRS data, and waiting for the data to arrive over sometimes slow radio interfaces.

Thirdly, and this is a small niggle, if you switch to the satellite view, you’re looking at the same data that you get from Google Earth, where some of this photography is really quite old. Of course if you look at a commonly viewed location, like Heathrow Airport, you get a fairly up-to-date view. I can remember seeing the western part of the airport as a large, muddy, hole, where if you look at Google Earth today you will see the rooftops of Terminal 5. This photography is perhaps 12-18 months old. However, looking at towns outside London, you will find images that are much older. One town I looked at features buildings that have not been there for perhaps five years. I question the value of being able to download, in “real-time”, five year old views into your mobile, since you’re probably going to use this information to help navigate.

It will be interesting to use this app as a navigation aid on trips over the next months, but I think it might pay to keep the GPS handy too.

Handheld gadget-meisters Expansys have started promoting their own, branded mobile VoIP service, Expansys VoIP. Reaching out to customers that recently bought Nokia S60 phones, they are promoting their low-cost IP telephony service that uses the WLAN connection on the phone.

Under the covers, their service is a tie-up with Truphone, who symbiotically have a “Truphone Shop” that leads to Expansys for the sale of SIM-free Nokia phones. The mVoIP tariff from Expansys can be found on their site here.

The .mobi domain has been established for about 18 months now, and aims to specifically address sites for the mobile web. Of course mobiles have very specific needs, in that the screen is small and data can be expensive. Data can also be slow, unless you have the latest 3G HSDPA features in your phone, and are in a coverage area. So .mobi sites should fit into the size constraints (especially screen width) and minimize the graphical content, to speed up access.

This makes mobi a domain unlike any other, in that the dotMobi organization are not just overseeing the sale of domain names, but must also provide tools to help developers prepare suitable web content. If you visit the dotMobi site, you find that they’ve got a nice little emulator (modelling Sony K750 or Nokia N70) for testing your web page. They’ve also got a ready.mobi site that allows you to get a rating of how compatible your website is with mobile devices, of which more later.

While exploring the .mobi domain, I discovered that a lot of the juiciest domain names have already been snapped-up. Of course you would expect that a lot of ‘.com’ owners will routinely grap the matching .mobi, if only to prevent trademark infringement or extortion. However, it’s clear that a lot of names have already been set-aside, and then there are a whole lot more that have been bought and parked, presumably to cyber-squat and profiteer from those that come late to the top-level-domain (TLD). In the former case, dotMobi have purposely reserved city names for a fixed period as a measure to ensure fair access, and it is possible to apply for the use of those names. dotMobi also sell off ‘premium’ names in order to fund their own organisation, because of course these developer tools need to be funded from somewhere. From the dotMobi blog, you can see some of the recent auctioned names:

poker.mobi - $150,000
ringtones.mobi - $145,000
news.mobi - $110,000
shopping.mobi - $55,000
email.mobi - $50,000
buy.mobi - $32,500
podcast.mobi - $25,000
cash.mobi - $12,500
pda.mobi - $8,000
zipcodes.mobi - $8,000

If you play around with a few common words, for example colours or small town names, you will find that a lot of mobi names are already bought and parked by other companies, often the same names coming up time and time again. For a TLD so young, it’s already quite full, although sadly with little real content, just irrelevant ads.

It’s interesting to try a few household names to see wo has registered and who hasn’t. Orange.mobi has a mobile-suitable site, but specifically for Kenya. T-Mobile, Vodafone, 3 and O2 are all registered, although O2 has no content and Vodafone’s is not at all useful. I noted that Marriott and Hilton both had sites (many hotels do not yet), although Marriott’s site didn’t work on my handset. Fans of Harry Potter will be pleased to see a Hogwarts.mobi, although it just seems to route through to a standard Warner Brothers website, whereupon my handset crashed. I ran a few sites through ready.mobi, but wasn’t sure how useful the ratings there were. I saw sites with genuine mobile content get rated 4 (which indicates good mobile compatibility), but on the other hand saw some mobi sites that got rated 5 (even better) that were visibly just www sites. In one case a site rated 5 caused the browser to lock up indefinitely on the handset, where the same site viewed from a desktop browser was clearly a huge, full-function, graphical www site. All-in-all it’s a pretty mixed bag at the moment.

A lot of mobile content sites have already gone with another convention, namely having the ‘m’ prefix, for example, m.jaiku.com or m.talkplus.com. Like .mobi, these sites then have mobile-optimised content as an alernative to the ‘www’ (www.jaiku.com, www.talkplus.com) site you would use on the desktop. This means that companies don’t need to buy yet another domain to point to their servers, and in some ways makes more sense since mobile web access is just one service that I might offer through my ‘nnn.com’ domain, for example today many use the same root domain for www, ftp, email and even IM and VoIP. Possibly of more importance, handsets offer challenges for text input, and m.name.com is slightly easier to enter than www.name.mobi. There is, of course, nothing to stop companies from using both ‘m.’ and ‘.mobi’ and mapping to the same optimised site underneath.

With the recent interest in the iPhone, many users that weren’t really aware that phones could surf the Internet will be looking more to the mobile web, so this is a great opportunity for the .mobi domain to grow. Some companies have already gone down the business dead-end of creating ‘iPhone-optimized’ versions of their websites. But why focus on the perhaps 100,000 UK iPhone users, when you could build a single .mobi site and address 4 milion mobile compatible handsets?

Well, if the Gphone is not a real phone handset, then at least Google have a good story to tell about their new open source mobile platform, Android.

For those that have been living under a rock on Tatooine, Android is a complete software stack for a mobile phone, written in Java, which Google plan to release in its complete open source code, apparently timed to coincide with the first shipping mobile device that uses the stack. Google have put together a consortium of interested companies under the name Open Handset Alliance, including chip vendors, software companies, telcos, and handset vendors, and including influential companies like Intel and Qualcomm.

Android provides operating system, tools, drivers and APIs, and also a nifty GUI handset emulation (emulating a phone with an ARM chipset) that can be used to test apps on a desktop machine. An early release of the SDK can be downloaded on the code.google.com site, so it’s possible to make a start now writing apps for the platform. Google are using a small robot logo in conjunction with Android, like the Star Wars movie confusing robots and androids; an android is a human-like robot or construct. In other words C3PO may be, but R2D2 is sadly not. The Android logo is a mee-too D2.

Yesterday the one-day Future of Mobile conference was held at the iMax Cinema in London, a venue almost as impressive inside as the Death Star, and Dave Burke of Google made a storming presentation about Android. He outlined architecture of Android, and also impressively wrote an application in front of a large, live, audience and tested it on the handset emulation software. Working in Java using the Eclipse development IDE on a Mac, he built the app in just under eight minutes. The app consisted of a simple web browser, so that you could type in a URL and see a page (this was about five minutes work), and he layered on top the ability to read a contact out of the phone directory, and display this in the browser window too.

It’s good to see that the UK Google team are so much involved in this project, and Burke remarked that they are hiring, so this should open some interesting new careers for UK-based mobile developers.

Of course for Android to succeed, they will need lots of willing hands outside Google too, and to that end they have announced a competition, the Android Developer Challenge, with 10 million credits (er, dollars that is) in awards to be given out to developers that make the most exciting Android apps. The competition opens on January 2nd, 2008 and closes on March 3rd.

So sharpen-up your coding pencils and get punching those cards (at least that’s how we used to program in Algol68, long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away).

Trustedplaces, the online review and reputation community site has just launched an iPhone-optimized version of their site at trustedplaces/iphone. Those of you that spent Friday afternoon standing outside O2 or Apple shops waiting for your own 135g slab of joy can reward your perseverance with a trip to the pub, and what’s more a pub that others have recommended.

No doubt there will be many more of these optimized iPhone services to come, but I wonder how sustainable this approach is given that the iPhone represents such a tiny proportion even of smartphone sales? My wife, who is not a techie, quizzed me about the iPhone mania the other day, and said “but the iPhone is not the first one that can connect to the Internet!”. Of course she is correct, but I guess the genius of Apple marketing is that many people have never thought before about connecting their phone to the Internet, even though many £50 handsets can.

On a recent trip to the US, a lot of my companions had an iPhone or two on their shopping list. In some cases for themselves, to unlock with the help of the Internet, in some cases for unlocking and selling on, given the weak dollar and the ease of selling items like this on Ebay.co.uk. Looking at Ebay today, unlocked iPhones were attracting bids above £350, which compares to the £190 or so you pay in the US Apple Store, or £269 in the O2 shops, both for locked units.

Apple are concerned about this grey-market since they have limited US Apple store purchases to two per person, and the AT&T Wireless store will only sell you one if you sign the AT&T contract on the spot. The Apple business model relies on kick-backs from the cellcos in return for exclusivity in the supply chain. The grey marketers are attacking the potential profits of the cellcos, and at the same time causing support problems as the ‘bricked’ iPhones roll back-in.

In the long term it will be interesting to see if the iPhone experiment allows the mobile operators to pass more of the handset cost on to the end user. Can you imagine volunteering to pay more money for your SIM-locked Nokia or SonyEricsson? Or will Apple have to knuckle under and do it the same as everyone else, with one price for prepay and another price for contract.

Nestling among the Java apps on one of my handsets is some beta software from UK company Trutap. I first heard of this company some weeks ago thanks to TechCrunch 40, and I’ve been playing with this applet while it was in private beta. Now the company have now opened the beta, so if you’re interested in instant messaging or blogging on the move, then you can have a try too by pointing your mobile browser at m.trutap.com.

Trutap allows you to see the presence of your contacts on MSN, AIM, Yahoo and ICQ, and send them IMs from your handset. Definitely challenging from the regular keypad on my Sony Ericsson, but a useful tool to add to the arsenal. Trutap also allows you to configure details of your blogging accounts, including Blogger, Typepad and Livejournal, and then to post from your phone. It’s a good looking piece of software, and looks like it should become more useful in the future as they add support for other platforms like my favourite IM client, GoogleTalk.

Users of smartphones based on Symbian and Windows Mobile seem to be well served for applications, but until recently the more humble run-of-the-mill handsets have been left out. However, it now seems that we have turned a corner, and we’re starting to see a good flow of apps for the low-end. I’ve been playing with Gizmo 5 in recent weeks, which overlaps in functionality with Trutap; I’m also evaluating another company’s private beta which I hope to write more about in the next couple of weeks.

Some of you may also be familar with the application from Eqo (pronounced ‘echo’), which is also on my phone. I spoke to their CEO Bill Tam a couple of weeks ago at Fall VON in Boston and we discussed his company’s product. Tam, ebullient and razor sharp, is a serial entrepreneur now working in this same area of mobile messaging and cheap calling. Eqo’s product is further down the curve than Trutap, and it already offers a longer list of interconnects from the IM point-of-view. Like Gizmo, and Jajah, the cheap calling is provided by making two outbound call legs and joining them together, providing cheap long distance or international connections. Also like Gizmo and Jajah, the Internet capability of the phone is used to send a small data message back to HQ, which then initiates the call legs to make your call. Data charges can still be very complex and unpredictable, especially if you are roaming abroad, so this is a useful approach.

Right now I can’t say that any of these apps has freed me to the degree that I can always leave the laptop in the office, but they certainly do have their place in staying connected. I hope to come back in the next few weeks and give a more measured head-to-head comparison.

I’ve just returned from a press event in London where Three and Skype unveiled the much-rumoured ’skypephone’, a custom-built mobile phone which allows users to easily make skype-to-skype calls for free.

The phone itself has all the features you would expect: 2.0 megapixel camera, mp3 player, 3G. I have one in my possession, and it is a light, thin phone with a good screen. User experience lives up to the promises, and it needs to be; it was made very clear that this is a phone aimed at the non-techy consumer. It is possible to sign up to Skype using the handset, and existing users can log in and instantly see all their contacts.

The price point is also set to make Skypephone a mass market device. It is available on Prepay for £49.99, with a monthly top up of £10 required, or free on Contract, for a minimum of £12 / month including 100 minutes and texts.

It’s not all good news; unlimited data isn’t included in the tariff from Three, although that’s not a deal breaker, given the £5/month unlimited data plan available. More significant, however, is the absence of SkypeIn and SkypeOut from the offering. These are important features of Skype which do have an important use in a mobile context. However, SkypeIn and SkypeOut are being worked on with a sense of urgency, according to Skype.

There can be little doubt that this will be a successful device, given the feature set and the low price. So Three will get some extra customers, and reduce churn by having an extra unique selling point. However, the real story is what Skype achieves through this. By getting itself on lots of mobiles, Skype moves from being the communications method people use when, for example, it is significantly cheaper to, or want to do a video call, to a primary method of communication. As Skype’s acting CEO pointed out, widespread adoption of this would enable people to say ’skype me’, knowing that wherever they are, they are reachable through Skype. If this becomes a reality, Skype stands to gain more users and massively increased revenue.

There are some unsolved questions; there is an inevitable tension created by having two communication systems sitting side by side on the same device, with revenue from each of them going to different parties. Every time I use Skype on my phone, I am depriving Three of revenue from chargeable minutes. This will be exacerbated when SkypeOut is available - it is in direct competition with Three.

I put this, and other questions, to Tony Saigh, Business Development Manager, Mobile at Skype, in an interview this morning:

Listen | Download [mp3 - 10:19]

Nuance Communications, well known for automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis software have acquired a whole series of companies this year to allow diversification in mobile and vertical markets like healthcare. Nuance are probably most famous for their domination in human speech technologies, both desktop speech dictation systems and enhanced IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. When last I looked at the stats, they had hoovered up about 70% of this marketplace by virtue of combining the “big two” Nuance and Scansoft into one company.

On the mobile front, Nuance bought two interesting companies back in August, namely Tegic and VoiceSignal. At the Symbian Smartphone Show last week, they were displaying the logos from both of these companies, and showing some of the technology. Tegic are the company responsible for T9, the predictive text system used on many mobile phones. One year ago Nuance held a competition where Ben Cook, the World’s fastest texter, took on a speech recognition system to see who could send text faster from a mobile. The Nuance speech recognizer won the competition, but evidently Nuance were sufficiently impressed with T9 that they decided to buy-in the technology.

VoiceSignal have embedded speech technology that can be found inside handsets from Blackberry and Palm today, which contrasts with the centralized, server-based recognition systems Nuance are famous for. VoiceSignal also power mobile phone technology for the visually impaired, such as the ability to speak the text from a mobile screen so that you know where you are in the menus.

It’s clear that Nuance are interested in developing their portfolio of wireless solutions, and in particular solving the problem of how mobile users send text messages, given that the majority of mobile phones don’t have a QWERTY keyboard. Actually even those that do have full keyboards today are often too small to enter text at any speed (e.g. the Palm Treo or Nokia E61), or just plain slow, for example the iPhone. Certainly “alternative input” technologies are likely to be a growing area as we expect more and more from our cellphone experience.