WiMax for Chile

VoIP: Back… in the UAE?

The new site’s focus is mostly travel + culture, but with a healthy dose of world events and global politics, provide there’s a travel thread involved.

The site you’re reading is going to stay as it is, focusing mostly on technology that somehow furthers the global village, or has direct effect on us as a society. Both weblogs will be maintained at a rate of between 1-3 posts/wk until I can find suitable bloggers who have similar interests.

And it’s not just China, a country that actually wants all of their bloggers to register with the government, as if they were some sort of diseased creature harmful to the populace. (Websites there already have to be registered, legally speaking.) Privacy International, a civil liberties watchdog group, has put the UK and the US on a list, categorized [Information Week] as “endemic surveillance society” and “extensive surveillance society”, respectively. That is, they’ve put the UK in the same list as China and Russia. The U.S. is in a list with Thailand and the Philippines.

The group surveyed 37 countries and applied “13 criteria ranging from constitutional protections to visual surveillance and phone-tapping.” The InfoWeek article indicates that “Canada and Germany scored the best marks for civil liberties safeguards.”

Part of the activities that put the UK so high on the “surveillance” list must be the fact that “the average Briton is captured about 300 times a day on film.” Three hundred. Smile, and stop picking your nose. Then you also have Scottish schools that make every child pay for their lunch by having their palm veins scanned, under the guise of offering free lunches for students of low-income families. (Though all students must have their palm vein patterns scanned and stored.)

Then there are the American companies, Digital Angel and their financially-related VeriChip Corp., whose top dogs are pushing for every human being to be chipped like household pets already are, concocting reasons that are flawed. They’ve even put forth the notion to the current US Administration (who they are in good odour with) that all soldiers should be microchipped, under some false premise that the historical soldiers’ “dog tags” are not sufficient, and that even an RFID-enabled wristband isn’t sufficient. It has to be implanted - or at least, that’s the conclusion to be drawn. And with the Governator, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who is in very good odour with the Administration despite who he’s married to, killing an RFID bill that might have afforded some protection against misuse, it’s hard to believe that anyone in power in the US (at present) really, truly has your security at heart.

Maybe George Orwell did not write fiction; rather, tapping in to some government source back in the late 1940s who knew the way the world was going to go if certain parties had their way in government.

Are you surprised? I’m not. Not one bit. What does this tell you about him, who purportedly represents the interests of the largest state in the USA? One man with no previous political experience represents, what, 35 million-plus people? If you believe that G.A.S. (Gov. A. S.) represents anything other than business interests, then you probably believe, well, let’s not go there. No, let’s do. Let me really stoke the political flames here. To get an alter-world perspective, read Philip K Dick’s frightening novel The Man In The High Castle. Then find the answer to the question of what role the G.A.S.’s grandfather played in history. Then ask yourself some tough questions. Do you really want a presidential ticket of Bruce Willis for President and Arnold Schwarzenegger for VP? (Since Arnie wasn’t born in the US, he can’t run for pres.)  First Lady will not be Demi Moore.

Sure, I still I outside to get groceries and sometimes to the bank, have coffee with friends, let the dogs out, and check snail mail. But pretty much other than that, I do not currently have any reason to go out for business purposes.

Just yesterday, I proposed an idea for an online magazine, then wondered if I was biting off more than I could chew. But then I thought, it’s actually relatively easy in cyberspace. Consider the following scenarios. The first is how I ran my print magazine, from 1994-1996, before most people had online access let alone e-mail. The second scenario is how someone running an online magazine might operate - a truly global village operation.

Magazine Management Before the Internet

Initially, I had contributors who were fellow students. But with the magazine being distributed in a 200 mile-wide area including and west of Toronto, Canada, somehow it started making its way to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, England, and other parts of Europe. I eventually had contributors across Canada - at several universities - and one in New Zealand. (To the latter, if by chance you’re reading this, I have some stuff that belongs to you, as well as that Cdn$100 I owe you. I lost your address.)

Having global, or even just national, contributors meant expensive phone bills - sometimes $800/m. I also drove from city to city (Windsor to Toronto), finding and paying for parking, meeting writers, buying lunch, dinner or drinks, spending time shooting the breeze, agreeing upon writing schedules that were usually delayed by one editor each time.

I’d also have to buy books, magazines, CDs/ cassettes, and pay for movies - either for myself or reviewers, and at least until we started getting free merch. Getting to that stage meant phoning up A&R people, driving out to Toronto to meet with them (I lived west of Toronto at the time). They’d hook me up with interviews with famous and semi-famous musicians, some of which were over the phone, others in person. (I missed my chance to meet The Ramones in person because of an exam, but I did interview Marky over the phone. RIP, Joey.)

Even though gasoline was then less than 1/2 the price it is now, it still added up, as did the time spent. I tried to combine as many meetings into a single day as I could. When I met with record label or book publishing reps, I’d also be distributing a new issue to stores and libraries, meeting with contributors to pick up their handwritten articles (yes!! few of them had computers then) or sometimes floppy disks, trying to sell advertising, dropping off invoices, or collecting payment.

Then when I was finished a meet + distribution run, I’d be typing in contributor articles or editing their typed work. (One guy, an English major, would use Microsoft Word to spell check his articles. But his spelling was so unbelievably atrocious, as was his use of the tool. If spell check told him the word was not in the dictionary, he would add it, in it’s incorrectly-spelled form. That was his justification for why his articles were full of spelling errors. I’m not kidding you. Still, aside from terrible spelling, he was actually a topnotch writer - one of my best book reviewers.)

Other costs incurred, which are probably the most obvious, are layout services, camera-ready copy, and printing. Fortunately for me, having been a volunteer at the university’s student paper, the operating staff let me rent out their Apple Macs to do my layout, as well as the photostat to produce camera-ready copy. I couldn’t have done it without them. And when my magazine folded, they never made me pay up what I owed.

Why did the magazine fold? A couple of reasons. Besides costing me probably $1500-2200/m (I was earning $15/h as a research assistant), it all took up so much time, and I was trying to work on a Master’s degree. I had no time to sell many ads, and ended up giving away a lot of them. (I got so fed up with the entire operation that I never collected what was owed to me by one record label.)

What really killed the mag, though, was when I went from monthly to bi-weekly publishing frequency. By then, having had a falling out with my Master’s supervisor, I was working full-time at a search engine company. It was impossible to manage a magazine at the same time. Even though I had a few people helping me (volunteer, as I had no revenue to pay), I had to put the damn thing to rest, and move on to another unsuccessful venture: promoting local bands.

Fast forward to today, and all of the tools available online. What would it take to run an online version?

Magazine Management With the Internet

Productivity is especially incredible. This past week, I managed to write over 45 articles, because the Internet makes it so easy to research. For my print magazine, I usually wrote 2-4 interviews/ feature articles and anywhere from 5-20 reviews per issue. However, given I’ve lost touch with the reps at publishing houses and record labels, free review-copy merch is not currently forthcoming. But there are so many sources of music and text content to review online that it probably doesn’t matter.

Cost-wise, online publishing can at least be started for next to nothing. Phone calls and even video calls can be done for free using VoIP services such as Skype or Sightspeed, or Gizmo Project. Some of these services even let me have free conference calling. Or I can use a regular IM (Instant Messenger) such as Google Talk, MSN Messenger, or to have text conversations. If I’m interviewing musicians or authors or whomever, I can - with their permission - record the VoIP call and use it as part of a podcast series.

Besides saving loads of money on phone calls, there’s no print run to worry about. I can use free CMS software such as Wordpress, Drupal, or Movable Type to publish my magazine online (in web page format). Free services such as Feedblitz let subscribers receive emails when a new edition is out.

The best part is that it’s relatively easy to find an ad network that I can use to generate revenue, or run some affiliate programs. So the chances of actually pay my contributors this time around is very high.

Finally, with websites like Verbdate, I don’t have to feel like I have no friends - I don’t have to be a cyberhermit. I can meet people online and actually chat with them using free Skype VoIP software.

The only drawback to working in a virtual office is that while it might improve your bottom line, it’ll also expand your waist line.

Markus Frind got it right, making his Plenty of Fish dating site free. Several months back, a young friend admitted to using Frind’s website to meet women. But he also used several other dating sites simultaneously. After he touched base with a few women, he asked for and received their phone numbers. For several months, he spent many hundreds of dollars per month calling them from his cellphone, some as far away as the Middle East, from North America. (He, like myself, does not have a landline in his name. I haven’t had one since about 1997.)

I asked my friend why he spent so much on cell minutes, not to mention long distance calls across the world. While he admitted to using an IM client such as MSN Messenger to text chat, he didn’t seem all that familiar with VoIP clients such as Google Talk or Skype. (This was around Dec 2005.) He said that his process was to meet online through a site’s messaging feature, then exchange emails, and then phone numbers. Text chatting with IM wasn’t quite enough; he preferred using the phone for a deeper connection with someone. Hence the huge monthly bills.

He never gave me a satisfactory reason why he wasn’t using Skype or other VoIP IM clients, and I lost touch with him. So I don’t know whether he followed up and downloaded Skype and got his friends to do the same. My limited recent experience using both Skype and Sightspeed is that you can actually get away with justing a $1 microphone (yeah!), unless you have your RAM maxed out, and/or are also running a videocam.

But now with websites like Verbdate and the ability to actually VoIP talk with site members, it might be worth it for those lonely hearts to get a bit more RAM and a reasonable microphone. And if my young friend is any indication, there’s a lot of demand for dating services that offer VoIP audio, and maybe even video connections. Verbdate is probably betting on this demand.

Are you wondering how long it’ll be before someone uses Skype-killer Sightspeed’s free WoIP voice and video calling service to build an online video dating service? Me too. So I called up the friendly Sightspeed support guy via Sightspeed and had a WoIP (voice and video over IP) call with him. It seems that they do have an SDK (Software Development Kit) and he thinks that a video version of an online dating site like Verbdate could be built.

Got an urge to do something like that? Send in a proposal to Sightspeed. Contact info is on their contact page.

For a bit more indepth look at Verbdate, check out VoIP Now’s VoIP Dating Becomes Reality.

Sources: GigaOm, VoIP Now - Sightspeed, PlentyofFish, Verbdate.

Links: [Skype, Sightspeed, Flickr].

I’ve talked about my town’s sucky bus service. They once had a system to call in and find out when the next bus would arrive. But it was an approximation and ultimately became useless during the winter. (We’re in the snow belt.)

When I was in university here, the transit system used to be one of the few in the world that actually turned a profit. Officials from transit systems in Europe and Asia used to visit to find out how they made a profit here. But that was when there was no Sunday service, no service past 11:45 pm, and no bus passes for the university or college students.

Things have changed since then. Drastically. The city has grown - it’s reputed to be one of the fastest growing in the region, and neither the roads or the bus system are set up to handle the expected population for 2021. Other things have changed at the local university, which in fact has affected the transit system. I’ll try to summarize.

At one time, the ratio of male to female students at the university was 70:30. Now it’s 20-80 in favour of females. (This is relevant. I’ll get to it.) There used to be, at my last count, 11 places that legally served alcohol on campus. (Can you tell this is Canada and not the US? What American college or university has bars on campus? The legal age, at least in my province, is 19.)

Many of the bars closed down permanently, after a couple of sad incidents in residence. For a few years, there was no alcohol on campus, except for grad and faculty lounges, and one high-end restaurant. Undergrad students, however, could not drink. At least not on campus.

At some point in the past 12 years, the transit commission changed their name (dropped the “Commission” part) and allowed university student passes. They also added Sunday service, albeit only until 6 pm. In a city of 120,000 people!! And since that time, they have not made a profit, according to what I’ve been told.

What also happened is that students started going completely off campus to party. When I was there, we’d alternate. And in general, we’d keep the peace and not cause too much trouble, especially on campus. That attitude usually carried over when we went off-campus.

Due to the more recent high female-to-male student ratio, a lot of young men from surrounding towns and villages started coming into town, hoping to catch some of the downtown action. Sexual mores have changed a lot in the past decade, and a lot of female students have been intentionally starting fights just because they can. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve worked at bars in the past, and I’ve never seen things the way they are now.

The result has been a lot of frustrated males - more so than in the past. Out of town males fight with in-town males, and sometimes the latter have taken it out on bus drivers. Then again, one 16 year old girl spit on and repeatedly slapped one male driver. So it’s not just male students that are violent. Sometimes the fights are between passengers, and for the stupidest of reasons. I recently overheard one young man recounting how he got punched in the face because he tried to stop two male students on the bus from fisticuffs. Apparently they were arguing about whether a killer whale was a shark or a dolphin.

It’s incidents like these that have prompted the cameras on board local transit, and no doubt will continue to do so in other cities and towns. Big Brother is already here. Has been, in fact, for quite some time.

Why, through VoIP and/or Skype, of course. Imagine being able to connect up directly with your friend through your VoIP-enabled phone, right from the travel agency. If you can touch base with your travelling friend, it makes it so much easier to make last-minute travel plans - something that’s still possible with regular mobile phones, but only in some countries, and at a high cost.

In fact, if both of you have Skype-specific VoIP phones (amongst others), you can talk to each other for free. Even if you just have plain VoIP phones and are both near a Wi-Fi network with Internet access, you can communicate on the cheap.

Alternately, some VoIP providers are offering their service using satellite systems. You are not using satellite phones, but rather VoIP phones over Internet provided via satellite. This means wide-ranging communication abilities, especially in areas that do not have access to the Internet. This will of course require a new breed of cell phones and smart PDAs.

But all this will be trumped by the other VoIP, Video over Internet Protocol. For many people, this means streaming TV over IP, but I’m talking about live video conversations. For example, if you’re travelling to unknown places, how much more comfortable would you feel if you could talk to a tour guide affiliated with your travel agency via videophone? Over the Internet, no less.

Or maybe you are supposed to meet someone in a foreign country. It would no doubt be nice to talk to them “in person” before you head over. Snapshots never quite do people justice. Of course, there are numerous other video applications, such as live support and video tutoring, maybe even real video-dating. And of course, there’s TV over IP, which is already poking its head.

We’re not quite at a stage where Voice/Video-over Internet Protocol is ubiquitous, but I don’t think it’s too far away. And if you think the Internet changed the world, I’m thinking we’re in for even more wonderful forms of mass communication on the Internet.

Tags: myglobalcity, my global city, VoIP, Video-over Internet Protocol

US calls are only 2 cents/minute. You have to have 786 DIDs ($5 each), but you can also pay $10 for other area codes. The monthly rate includes 100 extensions, and you can set up your own minute plans for customers, and determine your long distance rates. This plan also includes unlimited IP calls (extension to extension) and unlimited incoming calls.

If you need serious VoIP PBX gear, they have something called the SKYVOIP PBX softswitch (despite the fact that it’s actually hardware, not software) that goes for just under $4000, and requires “no technical ability” to operate. The switch is compatible with a number of IP phone sets including their own and the CISCO 7960.

If you’re not interested in being a provider and just want a residential VoIP plan, SkyVoIP has them starting at $14.95/m. Business plans start at $99.95/m.

SkyVista sells SkyVoIP services using “point-to-point encrypted high-speed two-way satellite SkyBand broadband connection.” They serve the US, Canada, and the Carribean using SkyBand Internet coverage. In fact, they can serve “[any] location with a clear view of the southern sky.” SkyVista also offers dealer packages, which are ideal for companies that are already selling satellite systems.

On one hand, it’s great that small providers can get into the VoIP business with little capital. On the other hand, I think the same kind of shake up is going to happen with the VoIP service industry as happened with small Internet providers: There are going to be a lot of them, and many are going to go out of business.

Most of these small VoIP providers will, unfortunately, not be set up properly for growth and will not have enough capital set aside. Hopefully, any such misfortunate providers will be bought out by bigger fish, along with their customer lists. Or else there will be a lot of unhappy VoIP customers in the next few years.

Tags: myglobalcity, my global city, VoIP providers, VoIP equipment

Other municipalities have been questioning whether municipal Wi-Fi (that is, free) is financially feasible, or whether they should just stick to regular (paid) city-wide Wi-Fi networks. MobilePro’s view suggests that since such networks cannot be fully advertising-supported, they obviously have to be financed by either taxes or monthly subscriptions.

Either way, citizens pay. From a city government point-of-view, this is a tough decision. If they pay for the network with taxes and make access free, anyone without a computer is going to be upset. If they charge willing subscribers, the monthly rate is going to have to be competitive and possibly offer something that other Internet providers do not.

But what kind of monthly rate would they charge? How do you determine the potential number of subscribers? What do they do if they don’t meet the minimum? Raise taxes anyway? In which case, why is there a need for muni Wi-Fi, free or paid?

Tags: unwired, municipal Wi-Fi, wireless networks, citywide Wi-Fi, MobilePro, Sacramento