Spokn a new generation service that is a true bridge between traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services offers the cheapest voip calls by use of landline, cell phone, PC, or SIP.
Spokn is a clean app. Its feature are tremendous. Basically Spokn is an Internet telephony service that works all the time, whether you are online or offline, on laptop or the mobile, travelling or at home. Spokn’s services are either for free or very nominally charged. Spokn provides 24 hour customer support, even to the free users. Per Spokn's website, their product revolves around the following
A phone service should work with phones - Free incoming calls from regular phones. Know more »
Spread the message - Spokn's Voice Messaging (VMS) keeps calls and costs in check. Know more »
Got a dollar? Get a numberOne dollar a month gets you a phone number in US, UK, Canada and more countries. Know more »
It rings everywhere you it to - Incoming calls ring any or all your phones or computers. Know more »
How can people benefit from this? Well let me give an example. Lets say somebody lives in USA and would like to make frequent calls to his friends and family in India. In this, he or his family would register for spokn service in India and once that is done, he would get a local access number from USA, dialing which he will be prompted to enter the spokn id (which is a 7 digit number that you get when you register for the spokn service). Dialing the spokn id, he would be connected to his friends in India.Now where the phone is dialed depends on the kind of subscription you have taken.
You could be logged in from multiple devices at once (like Spokn dialer on your laptop, a SIP device at home and from your mobile dialer too). If you have (optionally) enabled call forwarding, your regular phone will also ring. The call will ring on all of them for 15 seconds. If you pick it up, other phones will stop ringing. If you didn’t pick up the call on any of the phones, the caller is prompted to leave a VMS for you.
So only making calls are payable and the prices are dirt cheap, cheaper than skype in many cases and whats free?
* All calls to other Spokn IDs are free. * Incoming calls from other Spokn IDs are free. * Incoming calls from regular phones are free.
In addition Spokn has apps for the following smart phones till date (iphone is promised to be supported soon) * Blackberry * Windows Mobile * Nokia N & E Series
The biggest question that I got from my friend when I told him about this is, how different is this service from SKYPE? Spokn has answer for this here - Spokn vs Skype
I just downloaded Spokn and will be trying it out in next few weeks. In the meantime if any of you have tried it out, do let me know by leaving a comment.
Came across this new technology for typing in your smart phone called Swype. This looks quite promising as its lot easier than the traditional typing especially in a smart phone. The main idea is that you don't lift your fingers to type different word - you just swype across the keys.
To get an idea of how this works, Techcrunh recently reported a video that demonstrated SWYPE vs traditional typing in an iPhone. It also further states that it will be part of Android in 2010. Samsung has also announced that it will be launching OMNIA II on Windows Mobile 6.5 with Verizon.
Only time can tell if SWYPE would be threat to iPhone, but this is for sure a good invention to watch for.
Swype was developed by founders Cliff Kushler and Randy Marsden, along with a very talented team of software programmers and linguists.Together, their experience is unmatched in developing onscreen keyboard-based text input solutions for mobile touch-screen device.
Interesting video that compares Swyping with iPhone typing
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 01 December 2009 00:23 )
Downloading a video in MP4 format in Google Chrome browser
Written by Pradeep
Tuesday, 03 November 2009 14:23
I found this quite useful especially to make the videos I like play in my iphone/ipod when I am offline. To have this feature in your chrome browser, follow the below simple steps.
Go to Chrome BookMark Manager and create a new bookmark with a name you like - "Download Videos" or something like that. For address field paste the below javascript code
Note: The above bookmark works for youtube, if you want to make this work on other website, please change the url
Save the bookmark now.
Once you are done with this, you can go to any website that has a video embedded in it (like youtube, metacafe etc) and start playing the video. Once the video starts playing, just click your "Download Videos" bookmark and you will see the video getting downloaded in mp4 format in the Chrome's download status bar
Once the video is downloaded, connect your iphone/ipod to your computer and open itunes. You should be seeing the downloaded video in the video section now (provided you have the download folder added to itunes)
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 03 November 2009 14:35 )
Google Chrome Beta
Written by Pradeep
Thursday, 06 August 2009 12:23
Google yesterday announced a new beta release of Chrome browser. Following Firefox 3.5 tremendous success, this version of Chrome is expected to be somewhat a hit amoung geeks (atleast). The Chrome blog claims that this release is 30% more faster than the older release on both V8 and SunSpider.
The key distinguishing features that can be noted in this release are (other than the speed)
Ability to customize the new tab page - Its all yours now and you can drag-drop your favs, organize your most visited sites, remove some if you dont want that to popup and lot more.
Improved Omnibox - For me, Omnibox is the key feature of chrome (firefox and IE, both lag this feature). This helps you get into the site you are looking for with just few key strokes and with this release, google has optimized the presentation of the drop down menu and added little icons to distingush between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks and sites from browsing history
Tweaking the chrome - You now have the ability to change the way your browser looks - By changing the themes and this can be done simply by visiting the Themes Gallery
HTML 5 capabilities - Looks like most of the browsers (of course excluding IE) will hence forth support HTML5 features.Video tag functionality and web workers are included in this release of Chrome. This is inline with Firefox 3.5 support of these features.
Better speed - Beyond the improvements in JavaScript execution in this latest beta, there are a host of other improvements that should help Google Chrome make the most of your network connection. For example, when you open a new web page while other web pages are still loading, Google Chrome is now smarter about prioritizing the requests for the new page -- for instance, fetching text, images, and video for your new page -- ahead of the requests from the older pages. Loading pages on this beta release should also be faster than ever with DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings, and using V8 for proxy auto-config.
Ever since the release of the Chrome, I have been using it for my non-work related stuff - For mail checking, browsing etc. The main reason behind this is speed and efficiency. Undoubtedly Firefox 3.5 is quite faster, but one thing that irritates me is the memory usage.Usually for me, if I keep my firefox window open for the whole day, the memory usage goes upto 500mb (depending on usage) and I am forced to restart the browser. Chrome does not eat so much memory and the other good feature I like is each tab in Chrome is treated a separate process (in a windows environment) and if I think a particular site is taking much memory, I can simply just close that tab (I have heard that even Firefox is going to implement this feature in their future releases)
In another post in the official Google blog, google announced the acquisition of On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high quality video compression technology. This is in tandem of Chrome's support of HTML5 video tag. I had earlier posted how different browser makers differ in the usage of video compression technology and this is probably an effort from google to ease out that so that the video functionality gets included into html specification sooner.
Native Audio and Video dropped from HTML 5 Specification
Written by Pradeep
Monday, 06 July 2009 12:36
A sad day for all web developers (and internet users in general) who were looking forward for the audio/video support in the upcoming HTML 5 specification. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently announced that despite its efforts it could not include the audio and video codex in the final specificaion as there was no suitable codex that all browser vendors are willing to implement and ship.This feature was much awaited feature in HTML 5 by which browsers were to be made more powerful especially for features for online live video/audio streaming etc.
The original draft specification for HTML 5 included <video> and <audio> tags that would enable browsers to natively support this content without needing to install separate plug-ins. Unfortunately though, the major browser makers have not agreed on which codecs should be supported by the new HTML spec.
Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML 5 specification for W3C, wrote in a email that "After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately,on the situation regarding codecs for <video> and <audio> in HTML5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship"
He points out the current situation in the browser department as follows
Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape.
Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.
Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses.
Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors.
Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support <video> at all.
But good thing is that he has kept the option open for future and he gives the following two possibilites
Ogg Theora encoders continue to improve. Off-the-shelf hardware Ogg Theora decoder chips become available. Google ships support for the codec for long enough without getting sued that Apple's concern regarding submarine patents is reduced. => Theora becomes the de facto codec for the Web.
The remaining H.264 baseline patents owned by companies who are not willing to license them royalty-free expire, leading to H.264 support being available without license fees. => H.264 becomes the de facto codec for the Web.
So till then developers have to live with the alternate features like <img>, <embed> and plugin APIs, or Web fonts and font formats.Even Companies like Google were betting high on this feature for its upcoming product Google Wave and it will be interesting to see how this would effect the development efforts there.
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