TalkPlus - Voice 2.0 of Mobile and The Skype Story
Yesterday came out of stealth mode the TalkPlus project that has been over two years in development; underlining this project's viability was a coincident announcement of a $5.5 million financing by Menlo Ventures. Om broke the story early yesterday morning; Ken Camp, Stowe Boyd, Voxilla and Alec Saunders, amongst others, have posted their initial impressions. I spent an hour yesterday afternoon discussing TalkPlus with Jeff Black, Founder and CEO. Jack provided some of the operational details that were not covered in the press release. First an overview from the press release:
TalkPlus today announced plans to revolutionize the way people use mobile phones by offering new and innovative Voice 2.0 calling services that work with existing mobile phones globally. Under development for more than two years, TalkPlus' patent-pending technology will provide customers a wide array of new and advanced calling services previously unavailable from mobile phone carriers.
First Offering: A Second Number That Works on Your Mobile Phone
With an additional phone number from TalkPlus, mobile users can now take advantage of having two numbers on their mobile phone. This additional mobile number is fully functional and unique; it works just like a mobile number issued by a carrier. By having a separate number to both place and receive calls on the same phone, subscribers get greater convenience and flexibility, as well as the benefit of an additional layer of privacy. With a second number, TalkPlus subscribers will be able to easily manage personal and work lives, while carrying only one mobile phone.
Subscribers will also benefit from an online management center, where they can easily control the TalkPlus Number's advanced call screening, voicemail, and contact management features.
Incorporated into the "Second Number" feature set will be an independent voice mailbox, a rules based engine for call management, bidirectional calling (in and out) such that a user can, say, separate her personal and business life, while using one phone handset with one carrier account. If you want to apply these management features to your original (well publicized) mobile number, you can port that number to the TalkPlus service and have a new (probably unpublicized) number applied to your basic carrier service.
But the calling support services go beyond capturing voice mail. Here are a couple of examples:
- Designated number assignment: You designate, for each contact, which number will be used to call which party. (More below)
- Call log history - as you can on current Blackberries and Nokia (Symbian) phones, you build a log of dialed, missed and answered calls -- but this list includes all calls and attempted calls whether your phone is on or off. As with Blackberry and Nokia phones you can go to any call record in the log and trigger a return call to a calling party.
- Voice mail retrieval - you can organize your voice mails for retrieval by caller (callerID), caller profile (designated number) and use a call list to go directly to a particular call in the voice mail sequence without the need to listen to all voice mails received prior to the one of interest. So if you know that Joan Doe is going to make a critical call announcing a deal at 3:15 p.m. you can skip all her previous voice mails and jump to the one confirming the deal announcement.
- Bidierectional - you can both make and receive calls using your virtual phone number.
Users must have a wireless carrier service and, initially, a phone that supports Java or WAP applications. (Future releases will natively support Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry operating systems. Jeff's eventual goal is to fully support the approximately 160 mobile phone handsets covering both those currently out in the market as well as phones that have been in the market over the past, say, three to four years.) To support the call initiation and connection phase of a call, your account needs to include a data plan; the actual voice conversation passes thorough the standard voice channels of the handset.
A client is installed on the phone along with a unique TalkPlus phone book; again later versions will integrate into the native phones books of the mobile handset. Within the TalkPlus phone book (or TalkPlus-enhanced phone book) on your mobile phone you designate which number is used to call an individual contact. The called party will then see the callerID for the designated number.
While initially access to logs and other services will be via either the phone handset or a web browser, eventually all logs and services will be accessible directly from the phone using not only its display but also IVR and voice recognition for providing certain information in context.
Ken Camp, in a second reprise post this afternoon - "WhyTalkPlus is Important, What Matters to You", has envisioned many of the features and benefits of TalkPlus; Tom Keating, in a thorough comprehensive review, states, "I consider TalkPlus the Voice 2.0 company within the mobile phone space."
Jeff discussed some future expansions of the service, such as having multiple virtual numbers, availability of international numbers and calling to VoIM voice services such as Skype, MSN Messenger and AIM PhoneLine.; they are discussed in more detail in many of the referenced posts. Alec Saunders positions TalkPlus relative to iotum in his post:
Fundamentally, TalkPlus is an identity play that leverages an idiom we're all familiar with -- the telephone number. ... TalkPlus offers the same capabilities as having multiple email addresses, all reaching the same inbox, or multiple IM identities terminating on a single multi-headed IM client.
The metaphor is understandable, but the real magic may be in presenting a single identity from any handset. With a single contact point presented to the world, the value of one-number solutions is dramatically multiplied. Certainly that's an issue we've wrestled with at iotum. TalkPlus is a welcome and complementary solution.
TalkPlus is an identity play while iotum places the call in the context of the call recipient's contact categorizations along with his/her current and scheduled activities. We are starting to see examples of how Voice 2.0 applications evolve and even have the potential to mesh. The challenge will be to keep the user experience simple with a short learning curve.
However, of particular interest for Skype is this statement which Tom Keating made in the review referenced above:
One final interesting thing we talked about at ITEXPO is that TalkPlus has built their own Skype gateway. In fact, when pressed further, Jeff mentioned they actually reverse engineered Skype's protocol. Although the Skype gateway isn't part of TalkPlus's launch today, Jeff explained that they have tested it in their labs and it's working very well. He explained that from the TalkPlus Java application you will also be able to view the presence of your Skype buddies and initiate a Skype call or even receive a Skype call or even initiate a chat session. I believe he mentioned that they are also working on getting SkypeOut calls to ring to your cellphone as well. Thus, your mobile phone truly becomes your single communications device - able to handle multiple phone identities, and even your VoIP Skype identity. Similarly, they have a SIP gateway will be able to handle SIP calls - including direct SIP URI (email address) calling so you can simply dial "someone@domain.com". Other popular IM clients (AOL, GoogleTalk, Yahoo! Messenger) could be added as well.
Phil has seen a demonstration of this Skype gateway at ITEXPO two weeks ago; it is planned for introduction in the next phase of TalkPlus early next year. It will be interesting to see how it fits into the Skype ecosystem.
The "single number" public beta will be launched in mid-November with early January the target for a service launch. Pricing is yet to be determined; however, it appears about $10 per month will be the charge with revenues split with partnering parties.
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