The Payphone Project website is just that, a site dedicated to the humble and endangered payphone. Containing everything from photos to stories this is like a back cover of 2600 gone wild. There are currently no payphone pictures from Minnesota. I’ll have to add that to my list of things to photograph and send a copy to them.

When the rates on cell phone calling initially started dropping and people started to use cell phones as a primary home phone we saw a number of devices such as the CellSocket that were designed to allow you to feed a cell phone into your regualr home POTS wiring and use it with your home phones. Eventually the interest in these devices seemed to drop off and I actually picked one up on clearance for under $10. One of the biggest inconveniences is that they are tied to a specific phone model. Studies I have seen indicate the average cell phone user changes handsets every year which entailed purchasing an entirely new CellSocket something few consumers were willing to do.

The advent of the family plan which allows you to dedicate a device to replacing you home phone while sharing minutes may revitalize products like CellSocket. Meanwhile technologial advances may have solved the phone must match adapter problem. I recently saw a product called Dock-N-Talk which claims to do just that. You can get different cables for different phones but better yet is support for Bluetooth which has become a standard feature on cell phones. Combining a product such as this with an additional “line” on your cell phone plan could just be what it takes for you to cut the wire.

I was surprised to see a new Sipura phone listed in one of the telephony catalogs I receive. Last spring Cisco acquired Sipura, a popular VoIP hardware vendor. It seems that Cisco is now starting to offer Sipura products under the Linksys brand which accounts for some of the confusion. Strangely, the Sipura/Linksys 941 is not listed on either the Linksys or Sipura websites yet you seem to be able to purchase them from a number of online retailers. The popular VoIP-info wiki even has a page dedicated to the 941.

What originally caught my eye is the design of this phone, which is quite similar to the high-end Cisco VoIP phones, at a pricepoint of $149. The phone seems to support either four or two lines depending on which software key you enter which is a strange yet very Cisco-like thing to do. Assuming the phone performs as well as the Cisco phones this could be a promising phone for the cost-conscious small and medium size business.

Another development on the VoIP front is the price reduction in Wi-Fi SIP phones. Devices such as the UTStarCom F1000 phone are coming in for under $170. Keep your eye on these phones!

Last Tuesday Amazon unveiled an online storage service named S3 for which users will pay $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. Ars-technica ran this story following this press release regarding the service. One thing not obvious from some of the buzz surrounding this annoucement is that this seems to primarily be aimed at application developers. As far as I can tell as of now there is no friendly client software or web portal with wich an end-user can easily store their data. That said, this service does offer some interesting possibilities.

The firs thing I thought of is an online backup system. With prices this low the average user could store a DVD’s worth of documents for about seventy-five cents a month (plus transfer). That starts to look appealing as most users don’t have more than a few gigabytes of documents to backup. heck, for prices like that they could even backup their media collections, digital photographs, etc. Think of it this way, for $50 a year (plus transfer) you could have offsite backup of over 25GB of data. That’s appealing to me. The first thing is for someone to write a client for this. If it was me I’d be looking at the ultra-efficient Unison file synchonization software. You may need to get Amazon to support it or just use a simialr idea for differential transfers but either way it would keep transfer costs and associated badnwidth to a minimum. I’ve started using a procees like this for backing up my own data to an offsite server and once I got the initial upload completed the syncing happens quite quickly. The other problem I can forsee is a question of security. With the recent government inquiries regarding search results people need to feel that their data will be secure on Amazon’s servers. The application will need to have built in encryption to prevent access to sensitive data by anyone at Amazon or any outside company or government. With an easy to use file differential based and encrypted backup solution I can see a service like this becoming quite popular.

The second thought I had is that a service like this could be a boon to podcasters who seem to chew through bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow. With built-in support for the bittorrent protocol the only thing that remains to be seen is what type of sustained transfer rate Amazon can support. This could be a great in-between spot for those podcasters who have outgrown most web hosts but aren’t big enough to get a contract with a content distribution network. One report I looked at suggest estimating 60GB of transfer a month costing $40/month compare that with hosting on Amazon’s S3 service which would cost around $12. Savings like that can add up pretty quickly when you’re an independant podcaster. Again, the big holdup is that someone needs to write a client for this.

It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of applications take off and will take advantage of this service. There are some rumblings about Google offering a similar service which could make things even more interesting.

Digital media writer Jake Ludington has published directions for making a “Bottle Cap Tripod“. His tripod is inspired by a commercial Japanese product that sells for $20. This is an interesting idea but I wonder how well these tripods hold up a camera. It seems to me that the center of gravity on one of these is just going to be too high to hold the camera stable as a true tripod would. What might be a better descriptor is a monopod which helps holda camera steady but is not self supporting. Nonetheless this is an interesting excercise in homebrew camera mounts. I can think of a lot of interesting things you could put a tripod mount on such as spring loaded clamps commonly used in woodworking which would be a great way to temporarily mount a camera.