Date: 2008-02-14 15:33 Subject: Mobile World Congress - Barcelona Security: Public Tags: 3gsm, bluebox, fring, iotum, maxroam, mippin, mobile world congress, segala, spinvox, truphone, voipsa

I just returned from two days in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM).  That really is a big show now, and the sheer breadth of the mobile industry is quite amazing.  Everything was there from different wireless technologies to content providers, operators, handsets, service delivery software, security.  Just staggering.  For my money 3GSM was a cooler name for the show, but there you go.

As ever, though, the people make the event.  I finally got to meet Jonathan Zar of the Bluebox podcast, and also outreach chair at VOIPSA.  I've been collaborating with Jonathan at a distance for a couple of years, but this is the first time we were ever in the same place at the same time.  I've failed to meet him in America, in Asia and in Europe, and now finally we got to spend some time together.  Weird in our modern social-media connected world, that when we met in person we discovered that we were already friends.  Great to meet you Jonathan!

Other notable folks were James Tagg, James Body and Ali Khan of mobile operator Truphone, Alec Saunders of iotum, the irrepressible Pat Phelan of Maxroam, Paul Walsh of Segala (who by fortune was on the same plane on the way out), James Whatley of Spinvox, Prashant Agarwal of Mippin, Avi Schechter of Fring, and mobile journalist extraordinaire Markus Goebel.

Date: 2007-07-09 20:41 Subject: SpinVox on Newsnight Security: Public Tags: christina domecq, spinvox

I'd missed the Newsnight report on SpinVox, so I'm glad that one generous soul uploaded it to Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzKJA39v-xA

Substantially it's an interview with the CEO, Christina Domecq.

SpinVox do speech to text (SMS) to allow voicemails to be automatically converted to SMS messages.  There has been some speculation about whether this is all speech recognition, or whether some human intervention (the Mechanical Turk approach) is needed to make this work.