At the Voice 2.0 conference, I shamelessly played for audience sympathy by opening with a picture of my baby daughter. I said it was her 1st birthday, but I’d come to Ottawa instead. Why? The communications industry had never delivered me the working equivalent of the Fisher Price toy phone that would let me call my kids, or them call their grandparents or cousins. My younger one still believes the DVD remote is our primary communications device, and the sole use of the keypad on the cordless phone is to make nice tones that deafen grandma at the other end.
In other words, a high-margin WiFi phone is one that offers military-grade child-resistant controls and a couple of buttons which light up when some key contacts are around, and you sell in packs of two.
Here’s another product I want, but nobody wants to sell me.
I hardly dare call home when away because my kids are erratic sleepers at best, and it’s far too easy to get the timing wrong. I could text her mobile, BUT that makes a pointless beeping at inappropriate moments, or lurks in the going-out bag under nappies and “baby wipes” (the unspoken truth: “poo wipes”).
I want a big LED display I can put on the wall, and send text messages to. And a row of buttons to acknowledge receipt and return an pre-canned SMS. “Yes”, “No”, “Maybe”, “Yes, I still love you.”, “If you’re not home by 5.30 I’m going to murder them all by myself.” And that’s it.
So next time someone tries to pitch you another me-too USB Skype phone that does a bad copy of a deskphone at five times the price, tell them that the real deal is taking little slices of the experience of communications, and driving them into circumstances where the communications products can’t yet reach. It’s the Heineken strategy — coverage and distribution always win. Not everyone spends their day tethered to a PC screen, or is big enough to even reach the keyboard.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 03:40 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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You may be aware of this project I did for fun: http://www.toyz.org/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi/HeckleBot
Obviously it could be made to do what you describe, although a keypad or switch of some sort would be required to add the 'quick reply' feature you describe (as the device is shown there, it is 'headless' and all interactions with it is over the net). But at the end of the day, how big is that market and how much would a customer spend for it? The gear shown there is actualyly available and real, but expensive, as a result of its low volume and target markets (business and specialized applications).
Posted by: at January 16, 2007 06:46 PMMaybe you could adapt the Nabaztag to your needs:
http://www.nabaztag.com
Posted by: at January 17, 2007 07:30 AMThis is a really great case for open source telephony...you have some needs which are unmet by the industry.
If handsets and networks were sufficiently open, or even open source, there'd be a secondary economy of companies and services equipped to build out what you needed, both technologically and commercially.
Posted by: at January 17, 2007 10:46 AMWow, your kid is smart, it has narrowed it down to the DVD remote. My son thinks that every object is a potential communication device: remotes, MiniDisks, thermometers etc. Is he just ahead of his time?
Posted by: at January 17, 2007 12:39 PMYou may find this site interesting.
www.d100mobile.com
Posted by: at January 17, 2007 03:55 PMhey just to respond to Randall's comment above - would be worthwhile checking OpenMoko out: http://www.openmoko.com/
i reckon that freeing the applications from the underlying infrastructure is very important - something that the traditional telecom industry has had a hard time getting used to (too easy to cling onto yesterday's business model).
maybe we could take some of the OpenMoko components and use that to selective implement functionality to reach beyond the current product space.
Posted by: at January 22, 2007 04:31 PMI like the idea of the LED txt message board. But, as much as it's useful, it could very easily be spammed. You put one up in the house, you might find that the wrong message gets texted to the board at the most inopportune time.
Posted by: at February 14, 2007 10:55 PM