Dan York interviewed me to discuss my Phone 2 Directions idea; here's the video.
Topics: · business · innovation · internet · telephony
Mon, 2008-Mar-17, 12:52
Video Blog
Mon, 2008-Feb-25, 12:05
Turning Phone Numbers into Directions
As much as I'd like to attend the eComm conference, I can't be there in person because of a schedule conflict; if you can, try to make it to the conference, which promises to be very interesting. To help you find the way... here's something new. Call +1 312 252 1758 to get directions to the conference location. And you don't have to enter an starting address — instead, you enter a phone number.
If you've been wondering why the blog hasn't been updated lately, I've been quite busy working on this little invention. I call it "Phone 2 Directions," and it's based on a very simple principle: if I know a phone number, there's a good possibility I know the location of that phone number.
Here's a simple example. I'm driving along in an unfamiliar city on my way from the airport to a meeting. I get a bit lost. I don't really know what street I'm on, and often I might not even be certain what town I'm actually in. As a result, most conventional map services won't help me — I need to enter an address for them to work. Besides, map services require keyboards and that's not useful (or safe) when I am trying to drive.
A GPS system would work, but I'd still have to enter my destination, which isn't fun while driving. The same for cell phones that locate (approximately) where you are based on proximity to cell phone towers. Even worse, that requires that I download the cell-phone-tower-finding software to my cell phone in advance. And what if I'm using a plain old telephone inside a gas station to get the directions?
The easiest way to find a location is to do something the telphone is designed to do: enter a telephone number. Telephone numbers are everywhere: on doors of businesses, on signs, in people's homes, at the desks of hotel lobbies. If you're driving along and you see a telephone number, you can use the "Phone 2 Directions" service to get directions.
The basic idea is quite simple. By performing reverse directory lookup, Phone 2 Directions finds the starting location and the destination; it gets the route from a driving-directions service; it reads the results back. It's a great solution for this problem> I call this idea "Telephone Accessible Geotags," using telephone numbers as a way to find and mark physical locations, and there are many more services that quickly come to mind.
A few words about Ifbyphone. The demonstration is hosted at Ifbyphone, which provides the telephony, speech recognition, and text-to-speech services. The interface to Ifbyphone uses the familiar web services pattern, and Phone 2 Directions is one of the first "phone mashups" available. Ifbyphone gives away one million minutes (yes — that's 1,000,000 minutes) of phone connection time to developers each month. If you want an account with them to try your own phone mashup, just sign up.
The source code for a demonstration version of this software is available in open-source.
Or, of course, you can just contact me if you'd like to use a hosted version of this software.
Topics: · innovation · internet · telephony
Fri, 2006-Sep-29, 15:11
New Project
I've been busy again. I've just released some open-source softare, the Disposable Phone Numbers™ project.
I've written an article that explains my motivation for the project. The project has its own web site.
Topics: · announcements · open+source · telephony
Thu, 2006-Sep-21, 10:31
Disposable Telephone Numbers
I've started blogging at O'Reilly, one of the premier sites for technology. My initial article is about an invention I came up with the other day: Disposable Phone Numbers to help guard your privacy. Internet telephony disaggregates the authority to create telephone numbers and puts it in my hands, not the hands of the local phone company, and with a little tinkering it becomes possible to have (effectively) as many telephone numbers as you like.
Topics: · announcements · telephony
