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Talkplus

Carry Two Phones Into The Shower? Not me.

One of the more interesting mobile startups in the Valley, Talkplus, went live today. (They had a private beta before this.) Talkplus makes phone numbers virtual, breaking the link between a phone number and a specific handset. Instead a phone number becomes more like an email address or IM account; just another online identity that I choose to adopt for communicating with certain people.

Let me stop speaking in Powerpoint and give some specific examples. Many people carry two phones, one for personal use, one for business. (In countries where extended families are very important, some people carry multiple phones for talking to different family members.) The main reason we do this is to separate our professional and personal lives, the same reason that most of us have at least two email addresses. But you don't need two computers to answer your email, so why do you need two phones to answer all of your calls?

The Chinese company whose booth I photographed at 3GSM in Barcelona is one of many that offers dual-SIM phones to solve this problem. But that's a crude approach, akin to having one modem in your PC for each email account. It makes the phone fatter and more expensive too.

Talkplus can assign multiple phone numbers to one mobile phone. You can have one number for work and one for your friends; a few disposable numbers for companies or people that you are not sure about; one number that your company reimburses you for, and another that is your responsibility; one number for life, and one for the weekend.

Soon Talkplus promises to let you spoof Caller ID from your mobile phone for other numbers that you control. A doctor, say, or a lawyer will be able to place a call to her client from her mobile phone and make it appear that the call is coming from her office. The goal is not to mislead; the goal is to keep the mobile phone number private and confidential while still communicating the identity of the caller.

See what I mean about phone numbers being separated from physical devices - both handsets and SIMs? Calls can be made to or from multiple numbers on multiple handsets. Talkplus goes further, promising a lot of the functionality that we take for granted online but that we never get on our phones. Right now they let me can screen calls automatically, blocking calls from some numbers, and sending others to voicemail.

And yet ... when I tried Talkplus tonight my experience was very disappointing. Setting up an account and choosing my first number was easy, but here's what I had to do to make a call from that number on my Sony Ericsson K800i:

1. Launch the wap browser.
2. Go to m.talkplus.com/l. Bookmarked, but still several clicks.
3. Enter a username and password! Every time! They are numerical, but one of the weak points on my Sony is that I have to go through a couple of menus to switch from alpha to numeric when I enter text, so that doesn't help.
4. Enter the phone number that I want to call.
5. Wait a few seconds for Talkplus to setup my call.

Talkplus has great potential, but I hope that they are planning to offer a J2ME application for my handset soon. Right now I'd have to be desperate to conceal my phone number in order to use it.

Victorian Startup

Mike Wells writes code in the parlor

Summer and I moved to San Francisco on February 3rd. Our friends Joan Hull and John Phillips own the Parsonage, a Bed & Breakfast Inn in a landmark Victorian building on Haight Street, and they offered to let us stay for a month while we searched for an apartment. My partner Mike Wells and I have been working in the parlor all this week and I am nominating the Parsonage as Most Elegant Place To Start A Company.

Skype fires on Fort Sumter

A few months ago I wrote a series of rants about the future of the wireless market in the US. I devoted the last of those posts to my least favorite subject, regulation. Mainly I was surprised at how little attention had been paid to wireless during last year's debates about net neutrality, since wireless carriers block content providers and services all the time.

It seems that Columbia law professor Tim Wu was paying a lot of attention (to wireless net neutrality, not to me). On Valentine's day he presented a paper about it to the FTC. And yesterday Skype filed a petition with the FCC demanding that mobile operators carry Skype calls over their networks.

The head of the CTIA, the wireless industry association, was terribly upset:

"Skype's self-interested filing contains glaring legal flaws and a complete disregard for the vast consumer benefits provided by the competitive marketplace," said Steve Largent, chief executive of the CTIA in a prepared statement. "Skype's 'recommendations' will freeze the innovation and choice hundreds of millions of consumers enjoy today. The call for imposing monopoly era Carterfone rules to today's vibrant market is unmistakably the wrong number," Largent said.

"Unmistakably the wrong number." Now there's a ringing phrase. I wonder what he is so hung up about. Ahem.

The Problem With Ringtones

It's been a while since my last post, but attending two conferences (one in Barcelona), moving to San Francisco, and starting a new company chewed up a lot of time.

I couldn't resist posting about this article in the Washington Post, an overview of the ringtone industry. For all the excitement around full-track downloads, mobile TV, 3D games and the rest, ringtones still account for roughly 70% of mobile content revenues. Yet the companies that dominated the business just a few years ago are all suffering, because the music labels are doing direct deals with mobile operators and cutting them out. I've written about Infospace's problems before.

This paragraph about my first company Vindigo jumped out:

Some, like Dwango, went out of business. Others reinvented themselves as technology and service providers. Zingy, for instance, merged in 2005 with Vindigo, which offers mobile information services like MapQuest and The New York Times. Personalization services like ringtones, video and wallpaper images now make up less than 50 percent of the company's revenue.

I knew that ringtone revenue had declined while revenue from Vindigo's products had continued to climb, but this is a surprise.

The writer missed what I believe to be the most successful ringtone vendor in the US today: Thumbplay. Thumbplay markets ringtones directly to consumers rather than through the carriers and has built an independent distribution channel that the music labels value. More mobile companies should be following this strategy.

Full disclosure: Thumbplay, like Vindigo (and Ztango, also mentioned in the article), is backed by iHatch Ventures, where I am entrepreneur-in-residence.