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.

Lots of applications beyond web surfing and email (especially those with two-way traffic) require you to setup “port forwarding” to bypass your NAT broadband router. One site that has instructions for a great number of applications and routers is PortForward.com. They have great graphics that show you step by step what you need to change in your router settings for the specific application you want help with. Next time you need to know what ports to forward for a specific protocol or where to find the port forwarding settings on a specific router take a look at PortForward.com.

We’re going to cap off our recent string of patent related articles with this charm from the folks at Right-to-Create. Here they discuss how patents played a role in the development of early aeronautics and how the entire thing was put to rest by the government during the first World War because of national security concerts. While the discussion about the NTP patent on technology used in the Blackberry is somewhat moot now that those two parties have settled this article still provides some interesting insight.

The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn’t what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation.

In the end the Wright Brothers spent so much time in court that the advances they had made in flight technology were soon surpassed by their contemporaries. Certainly a painful lesson to learn.

Note that this article doesn’t get into the controversy surrounding who really made the first heavier than air flight. More on that can be found in this Wikipedia entry

You think that companies setup for the sole purpose of holding patents on intellectual property (IP) are a new pain? Think again. Way back in 1879 lawyer George Selden or Rochester New York started the patent process of the horseless carriage or automobile.

Sensing that the time was not right for a horseless carriage, he delayed issuance of the patent until 1895, by which time a young automobile industry was growing in the USA. Although he had no interest in manufacturing his invention, he was very interested in benefiting from it. Under threat of suit, almost all of the manufacturers took out licenses from Selden, or from the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (ALAM), to whom he sold the patent.

One manufacturer who refused to license the technology was Henry Ford’s motor company. There was a long drawn out trial before the patent was declared invalid for all but one specific type of engine that was actually not used by anyone making automobiles.

Who will be the Ford of the current generation? Who is strong enough today to stand up to the huge IP corporations and call their bluff? Of course it did help that in the late 19th century you had to produce a working model to get a patent. Perhaps we need to reconsider how easy it is to get a patent today.