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Friend and PhoneGnome founder David Beckemeyer and I have released version 0.16 of our PhoneGnome mobile MIDlet. The new version incorporates the ability to create a bit of temporary state in your PhoneGnome account such that a mobile call placed to a destination number will be placed as if called from your home phone. The new feature is accessible under Internet Call in the application’s user interface.

Check it out:

• Point your phone here to install: http://www.petrovic.org/j2me/pg.jad
• Source code

If you are upgrading from an earlier version of the application, you should clear your phone’s browser cache before attempting the upgrade. Not doing so could lead to inconsistent results.

[tags]phonegnome,mobile voip[/tags]

Sitting here this morning on my otherwise fine cable network, marvelling at how I can download multimegabyte files 10 times faster than I can upload them. So, fine, another lesson in how the Internet is still very much, too much, like broadcast TV: cheap to listen or consume and expensive to talk or produce. And, oh, yeah, my cable rates went up recently for the second time in as many years. Then I’m reminded of Andrew Odlyzko, who undoubtedly will go down as one of the great systematizers of knowledge of communications history.

Few observers have seen as far when they peered out as Andrew Odlyzko. Andrew wrote with durable insight about content and the history of communications as they relate to the Internet in what seems like forever ago. He noted that users of information value exchanging it with each other over blindly consuming what has been prepackaged for them. Or blindly using networks that predetermine what can be said. Which is why the communications market is many times as large as the content production market. Which gets back to how my network works well to move bits in only one direction, and therefore predetermines what can be said.

My message to network owners is this: I will pay for the network that lets me talk as much as I listen, and I will recognize it the day I see it. But first you must take out the cost associated with your content production and its delivery, whereupon I move from being a threat to being a customer. Your content is only mildly interesting compared to what the network as a whole is saying, everyone knows it, they are not obliged to forget it, and to continue suppressing what I have to say at the edge is to be on the wrong side of history.

I take back some of that rate increase.

[tags]andrew odlyzko,communications history[/tags]