Pat Phelan: Telecomms DisruptorSubverting telecomms from the edge of industry

I met with Cathy Burke of Travel Counsellors today and regret not meeting her sooner, its a great idea, a bit like having your own personal travel agent.
With the amount of travelling I have done over the last 18 months they would have saved me a fortune in cash and most importantly lots of wasted time.
Cathy also informed me that they constantly beat pricing on most direct booking due to the size of their operation and they have really competitive business class pricing also.

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Travel Counsellors is a truly dynamic and global travel company. Founded by David Speakman in 1994, the company has over 900 full time professional agents operating across seven countries and is widely regarded as the most professional home-based travel company in the world.
The company operates in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Australia the US and recently launched in Canada. Travel Counsellors Ireland was established in June 2005 and currently has 33 Personal Travel Counsellors in the Republic.
Customers benefit from having their own personal Travel Counsellor who takes pride in getting to know their clients personally, providing them with the highest possible levels of personal service and taking care of all their travel requirements, down to the last detail.

The personal Travel Counsellors each have an average 19 years of experience, meaning they offer a level of expertise and personal knowledge that few other travel companies can match. They are supported by over 200 staff at the company’s head office in Bolton, Lancashire who look after all administration - including ticketing, helpdesk, IT and marketing – giving them the time to focus on their clients and provide them with a personal travel service that is simply unsurpassed.

At last I can talk
Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has completed a round of investment into buddies QIK.
This is a serious move for Andreessen and longtime business partner Ben Horowitz.
Andreeson who broke my chops a bit on a TC40 panel last year during my MAXroam presentation is regarded as one of Silicon Valley’s smartest and shrewdest guys and this can only mean great things for QIK.
Huge congrats to qik and to Marc, Ben this is a great deal rest assured.

“Andreessen, co-founder and chairman of social networking site Ning, and Horowitz, vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s business technology organization unit, have made a “significant investment” in the Foster City, Calif., company and will join its board of advisors, which already includes Salesforce.com Chairman and Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The company would not say how much the pair of angel investors ponied up.”

Trust my buddy Andy Abramson to pull this one off

The worlds first call over voip to a passenger on board a plane.

Its really amazing stuff and I’m delighted that Andy got there first, love the bit about his dad also.

“I invited Joanna, she replied and once I figured out how to get Phweet to answer (I had to use Safari, not Firefox) Joanna and I were having a lovely conversation while she was on an Aircell flight. I don’t mean a five second hi, hello. I mean, a real conversation, as she held her Lenovo UMPC up to her face. I even heard the announcement from the flight attendants as she was about to land”

Well done buddy now please don’t tell everyone as I couldn’t bear ” HELLO I’M ON THE PLANE MOMENTS

Rebtel is one of the pair of telephony products I use every day (the other being truphone)
Well news has reached me that O2 Germany have now blocked the German Rebtel access numbers. I presume that these numbers come from Voxbone or any number of voip DID providers which mean that O2 are blocking all access to voip redirect in Germany and this will affect everyone in the voice 2.0 business.
I have just had a call with Rebtel Founder Hjalmar Windbladh and as you can imagine he is fuming.
O2 are telling their German customers three very different stories

1. They cannot under new regulations connect to these numbers
2. They will not connect to numbers which affect the O2 Germany business.
3. The numbers are turned off.

O2 are really penalizing their customers with this plan, the customers are obviously not going to phone long distance on their existing O2 account so will revert to phone cards or other methods, Hjalmar told me that they had had 100’s of emails from customers who are trying to figure out how to get out of their O2 contracts and move to other German carriers so this is a pretty pointless move by O2.
Yet another own goal by the world’s favourite carrier.

Anyone got any idea how I am running UMA on an Irish O2 registered iPhone?

I started off doing these trips to “The Valley” a couple of years ago now and my communications kit is finally at a stage where its really getting quite simple.
This pack started off at multiple phones, multiple laptops, multiple sims a couple of years ago.

Now its quite easy
MAXroam, roaming in the USA now and new USA inbound pricing so if they want me from home they call a local number to them and if they want me from here they call a local number to them, it finds me no matter where I am.
Its like GrandCentral on a sim to be honest.

Iphone 3G, with open wifi everywhere and MAXroam data when it isn’t is now my preferred email device, in fact only for we have a lot of meetings here where I have to do presentations the iPhone would be all I would need for this short trip.
I use Truphone when on free wifi to make my long distance calls and use the fantastic new and top secret MAXroam call-in service from my hotel if I want to completely avoid roaming.

So that’s all I really need for my communications now, one SIM, two phones, Iphone and N95 8gb.
Thats all I really need, Thats progress for me

Just discovered a very useful new application on the iPhone APP store designed by an Irish company, is this the first Irish iPhone APP?
EirText designed by Vincent Coyne aggregates your free online SMS from the carriers and allows you to send them from your iPhone.
Works from Vodafone, Meteor and O2
Very clever, well done Mr Coyne whom I have never met but hopefully will remedy that soon.

With bloggers currently moving to the newsletter format I had thought I better take a look at Toddle this weeks beneficiary of the Tues (Thursday) shove.

As a recipient of Jason Calacanis’s wonderful new almost weekly newsletter I would suggest Jason takes a close look at this product.
It does what it says on the tin
“Beautifully simple email newsletters”
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Intel took a sizeable investment in Jajah last year and whilst most of us speculated that the final product would be a virtual phone on a PC it appears to have gone a lot further than we had guessed.

JAJAH’s telephony functionality being paired with Intel’s latest Remote Wake Technology which is being announced later today.

“The combination of these technologies enables a PC to make and receive calls over the JAJAH network and ­ critically - to ‘wake up’ from energy efficient sleep mode to receive a call. Currently, the inability for a PC to function as a phone in sleep mode has meant people are actually missing calls while their PC is powered down, or are being forced to leave their PC running all the time, which is clearly not very energy efficient. With this new technology, people are able to conserve power consumption by putting their PC into sleep mode, without the risk of missing a call”
This is nice and would definitely encourage me to add a phone line to the home server.

Twitter have finally done the sensible thing and cancelled SMS delivery outside of Canada, India, or the United States and hurrah for it.
This cost most have been a serious drain on the company and has been mentioned by lots of people including myself as a worrying cost factor in the future development of twitter.

“It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users”

If this secures and safeguards the future of twitter I for one am delighted and congratulate Biz and the guys for making this move sooner rather than latter.