Callwave and dirty secret of missed calls

By Vivek | March 31st, 2007 at 09:04 am ET         

I had been planning a rant on the hopeless quality of voice networks in US, but Om Malik got to that in a good way. Personally paying more than $2160($90*24months) since I moved to my new place and being able to talk for less than 500 minutes from here all along can’t make me more mad. Still one thing Om didn’t write about are the “missed calls” that showup on your phone. Now I am not talking about missed calls when we don’t pick up the phone. It’s about those phone calls that never reach your phone. Those for which the phone never rings. Personally I have come across situations when the person you are calling is standing next to you but his phone never chimes. If it’s your wife you can easily get out of trouble by showing her the call log. But what will a caller located 3000 miles away think about you?

Just like everyone I am also a victim of this arrangement between mobile carriers that makes your calls end up on a server somewhere instead of your phone. Now advantage in blogging about technology and new products is that you get to play with each of them and eventually find some of them really useful. So few weeks back I started using Callwave to handle my voicemail service that delivers all my voicemails to me via email and a Yahoo widget. Besides the voicemail piece, Callwave also catches your missed calls. This is where the magic happened with me few days back. Callwave not only catches the missed calls for the people you ignored but also those calls for which your phone never rings. Since I use Blackberry and get my emails pushed to my mobile, suddenly I found myself getting emailed about few missed calls. I looked at my call log and there was no trace of those calls. You can very well guess what was happening out there. These are calls that were supposed to reach my phone, but get routed midway to a Cingular server. Strange but true.

So, now I longer miss my calls. As soon as the call is missed, I just open my email to highlight the phone number, and click connect to start talking. But this does speaks loudly about the pathetic voice networks in US.

Links:
Callwave gets all widgety

Snaptell - Comparison shopping goes mobile

By Vivek | March 30th, 2007 at 04:20 pm ET     3 Comments »    

I never love the last minute doubt about whether I got the right deal on my gadget or not. Well, Palo Alto, CA based Snaptell is going to get rid of this hitch with its new mobile based comparisons shopping service. All you need to do is take a picture of the product label and send it to Snaptell to get more pricing options via SMS message. Not an entirely original idea but definitely smarter one as compared to 4Info price check that can sometimes take 2 rounds trips to get the product pricing. To me it seems more like a mashup of QuipIt/ScanR and 4Info. Anyway, if you don’t have camera phone, you would be able to go the 4Info route, which is texting, to get the price.

Snaptell promises data from major internet retailers - Shopping.com and Amazon. Not the most price competitive sites to get quotes from, but still way better than BestBuy. To start with, Snaptell service will work with Verizon, Sprint, and Cingular cameraphones(2MP+) including the likes of SCH-A970, SCH-A990, XV6700, 8525, and more. What all can you get quotes for? Consumer electronics, software, computer equipment, kitchen products, and home and garden products. Would be worth trying out Snaptell for sure as it goes into public beta.

Links:
Snaptell

Get your coach at ActiveVibe

By Vivek | March 30th, 2007 at 03:21 pm ET     1 Comment »    

Another networking startup with a twist, ActiveVibe wants to bring together coaches and rest of us. ActiveVibe, which is under private beta, is aiming to get certified and licensed professionals onboard where they can be reached by the community. Calendar and client management systems are part of the play that can make life easier for coaches. As for users, we will be able to search for coaches from over 28 different sport categories. From there on you can contact the coach and move forward.

The idea is definitely interesting as compared to all the sports related networking sites launched till now that bring together the players but can soon hit the wall when the same users can’t see the path ahead. Making a clear distinction between who is who would drive more users to ActiveVibe. Still just like any other networking startup, ActiveVibe will have to play the balancing game of getting enough coaches and players onboard. Tying up with few select schools to start with might be the strategy for ActiveVibe.

Links:
ActiveVibe

iUpload - more money for wiki solutions

By Vivek | March 30th, 2007 at 01:27 pm ET         

Collaboration is the name of the game thesedays and as a result we have just too many startups doing that. Wetpaint, pbWiki, Confluence, CentralDesktop, MindTouch, SocialText, Google, Blogtronix, Clearspace, Serebrum, Intel Suite Two, Near-Time ………And now another well funded startup to compete with for everyone - iUpload. According to PEHub, iUpload has raised $7 million in it’s Series A round of funding from Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. iUpload service gets you Wikis, Discussions forums, blogs, forms, ACL, workflows, API….. iUpload seems to be strong in sales, which can win the game in this scenario. Besides the above, Microsoft bundling Wiki+Forum+Workflows+IM with Sharepoint can make life difficult for everyone.

Links:
iUpload

Basil - More web stats for your blog

By Vivek | March 30th, 2007 at 10:57 am ET     4 Comments »    

Basil is yet another startup offering web stats. Only difference this time around is that you can host the tracking software on your server. Stats from your Basil install are delivered in real-time, which can get your prepared for a server crash when your site gets onto Slashdot or Digg and thousands of people hit your site within a hour(of course Basil also goes down if you have it installed on the same server). Stats provided by Basil are similar to what you will get from any other service- visitors, referrers, searches, environments, locations, content performance, browsers, and trends. All this comes for one-time fee of $25 .

My motivation point for moving to Basil or any other real-time web stats service for the fact can be if it sends me alerts in case of higher than normal users start hitting my blog. Last time StartupSquad got dugg, I didn’t realize it for 2-3 hours ’cause of delayed reporting from Google Analytics. Services like Pingdom can also help, but in that case you will know only after your site goes down or slows down appreciably in which case even you will have trouble reaching the server and instead go for a hard restart.

Related:
GetClicky & Reinvigorate: more web analytics web20 style

Links:
Basil