voip

It's that time again! Second only to Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa and Chinese New Year's momentous annual events, 2008’s Mobile World Congress (formerly GSMA, now MWC) officially began in Barcelona today.

For those of you who don’t know, this event combines the world’s largest congress for the mobile industry with a leading-edge exhibition that showcases the very latest developments in mobile from around the world (I know, I couldn’t be more excited too!!!).

The Mobile World Congress, which runs from February 11-14, 2008, is the premier event for the global mobile industry, which is why of course that EQO is in attendance again this year! If you happen to stop by the show this year, make sure you come look for our local hero, Bill Tam (of current esteemed EQO CEO fame). He’ll be doing the rounds at the show and would love to talk to you about all the cool and exciting new things that are happening at EQO right now -- like our brand-spanking new awesomely-cool first Facebook application: EQO Vibrator (the name says it all...REALLY).

We also officially announced the GLOBAL expansion of our award-winning Mobile VoIP service at the show today. What does that mean for you, the EQO blog reader? Well, if you don’t already have EQO now couldn't be a better time to get it – no matter where in the world you are. If you already have EQO, make sure to tell all your friends who couldn’t access our voice service (and cheaps texts, and free IMs) in the past that they can now get up and running.

Also, just a reminder to you all that Valentine’s Day is this Thursday – if you’ve forgotten to get your sweetie something like I tend to do every year – be sure to check out MWC if you’re in the area. If you’ve ever been to a huge tradeshow like this, you already know there’s is tons of free swag to be had that would serve as great last minute gift ideas... nothing says loving like corporate branded promotional items.

Lastly, in case attending MWC doesn’t float your boat – and if you live in and around the Vancouver area, today is also the last day to attend the Pontiac GMC Canadian Championships in Whistler, BC, featuring men and women competing in Downhill and Super Combined events on the new Wild Card/Jimmy's/Lower Franz's course – which I highly doubt will be anywhere near as exciting as what’s happening at MWC.

Jobs is known for being cheeky - but check this out, then imagine the cursing going on in the boardrooms of Apple's operator partners after today's launch of the iPod Touch:

• Jobs: “Wi-Fi, as you know, is not only faster than 2.5G, but it’s faster than any 3G network”.
• Song playing on the iPod Touch: "Cellphone's Dead - Beck"
• On the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store: "We're gonna do something else, too: we're gonna bring it to the iPhone"

What Apple has done is make the carrier networks look old and stale. They are saying, remember the iPhone? Of all the things you loved about it, none of them were enabled by your operator. Just the contract. Here's one without the contract.

And reading between the lines: Oh, but you want voice? Stay tuned.

Cellphone's dead indeed.

Blast from the recent past: "When asked about a give-and-take leading to the Apple-Cingular partnership, [Cingular CEO] Lurie said, "I'm not sure we gave anything." Later, he commented, "I think they bent a lot."

Jeff

Yeah, I know it is July--and that it has been July for a quite some time now--but I can't just blow off June. June was an exciting month at EQO. The first month after launching a new product is always a busy time and June was no exception. This first month is always the month were the most bugs are found on any Beta program. This translates into a lot of work for beta testers. Thanks to the efforts of our users, we have fixed a lot of bugs--thanks for the help everybody!

Speaking of EQO users, Philippe-Henri Bazire of Switzerland is probably the hardest working Beta tester we have ever had. He has tried fruitlessly to get EQO on his Nokia 6170. Every time he tries to download the file he gets an error message that says "invalid file type". Are there any Nokia 6170 users out there in EQOland who have advice for Philippe? He would really like to see this work on his 6170.

On the bright side, Philippe has had success with his Nokia 6234. So he has had a taste of what EQO has to offer. For all his hard work, Philippe will be receiving one of the hottest prizes out there--an EQO Prize Pack! Woot!

Peter
EQO Customer Support

What's it like to live and work in Vancouver?

Here's an interesting guy I met while taking the train back home from downtown after last week's Demo Camp Vancouver.

Yes, the bird is real. A slice of Vancouver life.

EQO is currently hiring Mobile App Developers and Softswitch Developers as well as other positions.

We have a work hard / play hard environment and we're growing fast but are still small enough that everybody knows everybody. We love doing what we do and are looking for people to join our team who feel the same way. Apply to careers@eqo.com

Jeff
EQO Co-Founder and Chief Software Architect

We are happy to announce EQO Communications’ Beta Tester for the Month of May: Poul Sorensen of Denmark!

His efforts have earned him this prestigious award, and for this reason, we have decided to summarize his accomplishments in the form of an … acronym.

P – persevering

To start, in a span of two weeks, Poul has spent over 80 hours and has visited over 100 different homepages and forums in hopes of getting EQO Mobile on his cell phone because T-Mobile currently only provides the Midlet manager 1.0 in there update Rom to MDA PRO (Qtek 9000 and HTC universal). Ten hours of his life went to finding an alternative to the free Midlet from IBM, when he finally bought system tweaks to get command over the installation, and six hours went to reinstalling the whole setup for the program. If that’s not a trooper, I don’t know what is.

O – offers to help anyone and everyone.

Due to his unwavering dedication, Poul has even gone so far as to helping other users discover the benefits of EQO. Recently in the forum, Poul has helped comment on a Request for a bit more "technical" information, and has given his personal testimony of paying only a quarter of what his phone bill used to be thanks to EQO!

U – ultimation.

What does this mean, you ask? Well according to the dictionary definition: Ul`ti*ma"tion\, n. State of being ultimate; that which is ultimate, or final; ultimatum. [R.] --Swift. Enough said.

L – linguist

Not only can this man speak English, but he can also translate German!

For each EQO User out there, we sincerely appreciate all of your help and look forward to having you stay involved as we continue to improve our services and features. Your feedback has a huge impact on our priorities, so please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help. We look forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,

Christine

We've been working on a new EQO Mobile for, well, ever since the last EQO Mobile came out in October. This EQO Mobile promises to be a vast improvement over the last EQO Mobile. We've scientifically proven that its is no less than 47 times better and you can't argue with science. It is a similar product in terms of core features and if you are a current EQO fan, I promise you will be a future EQO fan. We are now currently looking for beta testers to join our formal beta program and we welcome all interested parties who meet the requirements, which are:

• You must have a name and you must tell us that name.
• You must reside in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom or the United States.
• You must have a mobile phone capable of running J2ME MIDP 2.0 applications.

If you are interested in being one of the select few chosen to get their hands on the new EQO Mobile before anyone else, please send an email to beta@eqo.com providing your name, country, mobile service provider, mobile phone number, mobile phone model, EQO ID (if you have one) and a brief description of why we at EQO should select you for the EQO Mobile beta test program.

We greatly appreciate the help of our users and welcome all comers. Thanks in advance for your applications!

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

The net neutrality debate has a tendency to get too abstract for the average user to care. Pricing this - tiered service that - enough already. Users just want something that works. Is it working right now? Close enough for most.

Enter the Mobile Operators.

As Gearlog reports, T-Mobile is taking steps to block popular mobile applications like Opera Mini that will make the average user stop and ask what is going on. Other mobile operators are threatening similar action.

As a well known congressman once said, "If you're explaining, you're losing".

The bright side to heavy-handed actions like T-Mobile's is that they show ordinary users why Net Neutrality matters better than any long-winded explanation by the likes of a techno-geek ever could.

Jeff
EQO Founder and Chief Architect

Three years ago, peer-to-peer technology was all the rage made popular by Skype and file sharing applications such as KaZaA, Shareaza, and BitTorrent. I too caught the P2P bug and together with two other co-founders developed a P2P-based distributed telephone switch. Coming from a telecom background in mobile network equipment and Internet Multi-media Subsystem (IMS), we thought the use of P2P for node addressing and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for call signaling would make for a powerful and low cost disaggregated telephone soft-switch. We experimented with several P2P protocols including Sun's JXTA, Gnutella2 and FastTrack but eventually ended up with a beta product based on the more structured Pastry P2P design. The rationale was that to have a P2P network that can match the performance of traditional telephone switches, we needed a P2P protocol that is more real-time deterministic and one that can be made practical on limited resource end-user device such as mass market mobile phones.

Sometimes Windows restarts your computer to do updates, but what if you are on the road using EQO?  Don’t let Windows Update mess up your overseas calling, use the automatic sign in feature that EQO provides.  If you want EQO to start whenever you start your computer, first make sure that Skype starts when your computer starts too.  Then right click the EQO icon in the system tray and choose Startup Settings.  Just check “Sign me in automatically” and “Start EQO when computer starts” and you are good to go.  Now pesky restarts won’t stand in the way of you and your buddies.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

A rather generous colleague of ours who goes by the name of PhoneBoy was kind enough to ship us his Nokia 9300 communicator. He had been testing EQO Mobile on a Nokia 6670 when we got to talking about how he was quite sure that EQO would work on his 9300 and very likely his 9500 as well. I may have been out of line in asking to borrow one of them, but he kindly agreed to send us a phone nonetheless. Now here we are a week later with EQO Mobile running on the Nokia 9300 and Nokia 9500 and it’s all thanks to Mr. PhoneBoy.

We are pretty quick when it comes to porting EQO over to new handsets, but one of the problems in getting more and more phones supported is getting our hands on the phones themselves. Now if you are big into phones and you have a MIDP 2.0, GPRS enabled handset that you wouldn’t mind parting with for a week, we’d gladly take it off your hands with the aim of getting EQO Mobile running on your baby. Of course, I can’t make any promises but I’m quite sure that there are some Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones out there that could run EQO Mobile after a few tweaks in code/graphics. What’s in it for you? An EQO t-shirt and the chance to be the first to use EQO on your particular phone (we’re a startup, what more do you want?). Please email me, chris@eqo.com, if you are interested in helping us get you using EQO faster.