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?

The UK’s Ordnance Survey create some of the World’s best maps. Going far beyond mapping just the roads, OS provide some of the most detailed mapping, good for walkers, cyclists and runners too. The problem is, that the OS has some onerous licensing restrictions that make it impossible for a lot of services to use their maps. The ‘mashup’ culture has largely had to get along without the help of the OS, with Google Maps being the data source that a lot of companies work with. Some time back, Google even tried to strike a deal with OS to use their UK maps, but it foundered.

One emerging alternative to OS is the Open Steet Map Project (OSM), which is trying to build its own mapping database for the UK. The idea is simple, regular folk go out and map the landscape using their own GPS devices, and gradually a network of roads, footpaths and waterways emerges.

Nestoria’s Ed Freyfogle told me an interesting story about OSM, of a Durham University student, Gregory Marler, who decided to live his student life without using any copyrighted maps. At the time he started in Durham, the town was more-or-less a blank space in terms of the OSM project, and so he set out to help create the map for the town. Gregory’s blog, Living With Dragons, takes its name from ancient maritime maps which might mark the unknown with “Here be Dragons”. You can read an interview with Gregory on the Nestoria Blog. The Open Street Map project is doing very well now, and recently celebrated the completion of mapping of Brighton.

The Guardian newspaper has started its own Free Our Data campaign, as it’s not just the OS that’s the problem. Many previously Government-run services have been privatised and allowed to take their data with them into the private sector, even though taxpayers’ money was used to create the databases. In many cases, Government subsidies are still paid, so some of these companies can get paid both ways. Postcodes are an often-cited example: the UK post codes database belongs to Royal Mail, and they make it expensive to license. Of course many products and services allow postcode-to-map lookup (e.g. sat nav and many online sites), which they must pay Royal Mail for. Here there are user-led projects like the New Poplar Edition and Free the Postcode, that are encouraging users to provide their own data mapping postcodes to map location, so that eventually a free and open database will exist.

It’s not all negative for the Ordnance Survey, though. The Geograph project is a project to collect at least one photograph for every OS map square in the UK. OS maps are split into 1km squares, with each square having its own reference number, for example the centre of Heathrow airport is at TQ0775. The OS are official sponsors of the Geograph project, and allow Geograph use of their maps as part of the site. I think this is the kind of activity we want to see OS involved in, and it doesn’t mean selling fewer maps, but rather selling more; I’ve contributed pictures to Geograph myself and consequently bought more OS maps in the last 3 years than I did in the previous 10. Let’s see the OS embrace the web mashup culture more: come on guys let’s have some more licensing flexibility from you.

Sydney, Australia-based telephony services company Voxalot have launched their own free calling utility for Facebook, VoxCall. Signing up to VoxCall gives you free calling to other FB users (that have also installed the utility), has conference rooms to setup multi-party conferences, and also gives you a click-to-call button on your FB profile.

Facebook is starting to build quite a useful list of apps in this space now, with a variety of buttons to access external services (e.g. Skype), and useful conferencing and voicemail services from the likes of iotum and FWD. In the case of VoxCall, the button is an interface to a VoIP service provider that already provides a range of value-added services to Internet Telephony Services Providers (ITSPs) all over the planet. If you already have a SIP URI, then signing up for VoxCall takes only a few seconds, including a test call that they make to check that it’s really your phone; you answer the call and enter the PIN code they display on FB, then you’re signed up. A SIP URI, if you haven’t come across that, is the native addressing system used for phones in the SIP/VoIP world; instead of a telephone number, a URI is an identifier that looks like an email address, e.g. sip:fred@voxalot.com, that you can use to dial and connect VoIP phones together. In many cases, ITSPs provide both SIP URIs and telephone numbers that ring to the same phone. Often the SIP URI has the number embedded into it, so when I tested Voxalot one of the things I tried was my Truphone account. My Truphone number starts with 07978, so there is a matching URI 447978xxxxxx@truphone.com that works with Voxalot.

VoxCall is a nice little utility, free to use, and as Voxalot point out themselves it’s pretty convenient because your FB friends can click to call you without needing to know which number is being used under the covers. This means you can switch numbers (e.g. from landline to Truphone) whenever you like, and the calls will still get through without you having to tell anyone.

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.

If you use Firefox or Flock then you probably use browser extensions and one of the most useful is greasemonkey which enables end users to write (Java)Scripts to further customise/personalise their favourite web applications.

I use several scripts already for Gmail, Linkedin, Plaxo, twitter and I recently added a few new Facebook scripts.

1. Scriptt (small - 4kb) makes pages load faster, enlarges image thumbnails, has a dynamic application remover, removes ads, and displays ages.

thumbnail: right click on any thumbnail in any album / profile and it will appear bigger on the top left of the screen (with description if available). then left click the blown up image and it will hide once again.

app remover: this creates an “x” on the top right of every application. when clicked, it hides the application and adds it to a database of applications to be hidden in every profile. also, by clicking the app icons (under the profile picture) it un-hides the desired app and removes it from the database. to completely clear the database, click on “reset appkill” in the user script command menu. note: this does not hide applications on your profile page, only on others’

ad remover: removes the facebook flyer ads under the application menu. There are many of these type of scripts. A few of the newer scripts also block social ad requests.

age checker: displays age of person next to their birthday for the numerically challenged.

and, of course, if you want to disable any of the above features, just edit the userscript and set the respective boolean to “false”

2. Other Facebook scripts I found include one that added microformat markup to any Facebook profile. Then by using the Operator plugin for Firefox/Flock you can detect the microformat markup and use more action scripts to utilise the data further. For example I could plot a Facebook friend on a Google Map or add them to my address book.

Tom Morris has also created an Operator action script for Skype, so you can directly call a Facebook contact via Skype. You can read about it and download it at http://tommorris.org/blog/.

There are plenty of other scripts such as the remove the “is” status annoyance but if you come up with or know of other useful scripts please let us know.